Insights
Everything you ever wanted to know about growing a marketing agency in your inbox every week.
How many people should be on your leadership team?
I help agencies to overhaul (or sometimes initially build) their leadership teams and make them more productive, so here are some general rules about team size to get you thinking.
CASE STUDY: our client gifting strategy (gin)
If you give gifts to clients (for Christmas, or any reason), this one's for you. It's about how Rise at Seven's gifting strategy came together (and why it worked).
AMA #1: AI, plus moving from specialist to business development
This is the first Ask Me Anything I've published. If it proves popular (e.g. people message me saying they like it and, especially, if you ask me more questions) then I might make this a regular feature in between my other articles. Enjoy!
A tool to help you understand and prioritise your clients
Each of our clients should (hopefully) have a scope of work - showing what we’re contractually obligated to deliver - and we allocate our resources accordingly. But that’s not enough.
2 commercial pinch points agencies are experiencing right now
Since several factors are coming together to affect agencies’ commercial performance, I wanted to share a couple of places where I see this manifesting itself.
CASE STUDIES: 3 pricing strategies we employed on our way to £12m in 3 years
Lately I’ve been helping a few marketing agencies with their pricing strategy as part of my work as a business development consultant, so now seems like a good time to share some of the pricing strategies we employed at Rise at Seven to get to £12m billed in our first 3 years.
Getting the right people in the right seats on the bus
Jim Collins famously says that in order to become great, companies need to “first get the right people on the bus, in the right seats...and then figure out where to drive it.” Please indulge me while I torture this metaphor into agency shape and tell you exactly what I think you should do about it.
5 ways to stop losing pitches to inertia
Many of the new business opportunities you lose (or most that you don’t hear back from) don’t go to other agencies…they go nowhere. Here are 5 trade-offs clients make when they choose not to give us (or someone else) the work.
Inside Missguided: how a weeks-old agency won a six figure deal with a global brand
Whenever anyone asks me to tell the story of Rise at Seven, I casually mention that we won global fashion brand Missguided when we were six weeks old and it never fails to get a reaction. This is the story of how that deal happened.
A simple recruitment scorecard
Several of my clients are hiring right now, so I’m returning to recruitment scorecards fairly often.